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The Hungarian pollsters have been disagreeing about how much the grip which Viktor Orban’s governing party Fidesz has on the Hungarian electorate has been slipping. Things surely aren’t looking as favourable for them as, say, half a year ago, for a number of reasons. One has to keep in mind, however, that Fidesz enjoyed quite a boost after its national election victory last April, when it went on to win big in European and municipal elections later in the year as well. So to some extent we’re merely seeing a return to the already impressive level of support it enjoyed in those April elections.

Chart: Hungarian polls, late January/early February 2015 (click to enlarge)

Chart: Hungarian polls; grouping together the left-liberal parties that ran a joint "Unity" list in last year's national elections (click to enlarge)

Fidesz’s current two-thirds parliamentary majority is in question with by-elections taking place in Veszprém two days from now. The district includes both Veszprém itself, a relatively prosperous town in Western Hungary, and some surrounding countryside, and outgoing MP Tibor Navracsics (now European Commissioner) won the seat easily last year, so it’s not the easiest place for the opposition to launch a challenge. If it does win the seat, however, Fidesz could theoretically be prevented from adopting further, hard-to-overturn “cardinal laws,” which require a two-thirds majority – though that presumes that the MPs from the center-left parties and the far-right Jobbik are able of voting in unison against the government. Even if Fidesz will hold on in Veszprém (and it’s still favoured to do so), it will face the same challenge all over again in parliamentary by-elections in a district centred on nearby Tapolca in April.

In its infinite wisdom, the left-liberal opposition parties are supporting a “free-market evangelist” as their joint candidate, Zoltán Kész. The hard-right Hír TV station has dug up not all that old blog posts and social media comments in which Kész advocated privatizing health care and primary education and even making voting rights conditional on tax payments. That’s the Hungarian “left” — the same left which hurried to distance itself from Alexis Tsipras in the aftermath of Syriza’s election victory in Greece — proving once again that it is anything but. It did, after all, also eventually embrace Lajos Bokros, known best for the 1990s “Bokros package” of massive budget cuts, in the Budapest mayoral elections. The Green LMP is the only party on the left which is refusing to support Kész, whom András Schiffer called the candidate of the “pseudo-Left”.

Having said that, the government does seem somewhat worried, jumping in late last year to quickly direct a special, 2.5 million Euro grant toward Veszprém. Although Fidesz easily dispatched all opposition forces in last October’s local elections, at least outside Budapest, it hasn’t been lucky in local by-elections since. Eva S. Balogh summarizes the story on those, with left-liberal opposition voters apparently even showing some readiness to swing behind candidates of the far-right Jobbik if that’s what it took to oust a Fidesz councillor. The seemingly only opinion poll to be held in the Veszprém district saw a close race, with Fidesz candidate Lajos Némedi only narrowly leading Kész by 43% to 37%, and even that only thanks to the rural parts of the district, while Kész led in the city itself.

Despite his libertarian views, I hope Kész wins, and Veszprém might be a liberal enough town for him to stand a chance. This is no way for the opposition to rebuild a national election-winning force though. Hungarians have arguably voted out the parties most associated with budget cuts, privatizations and market-friendly reforms almost every single time since 1994, ever again believing the then-opposition’s (deceptive) promises that they would govern more socially. They brought back the socialists from the dead in 1994, then voted in Fidesz in 1998 when those socialists turned out to be more neoliberal than even the previous conservative government. They kicked Fidesz out again in 2002 in favour of the newly-populist Socialists, and reelected those in 2006 after they’d gone on a rather irresponsible spending spree. In 2010, after four years of Gyurcsany and Bajnai pursuing austerity, they dealt the Socialists a massive defeat in favour of Fidesz, and last year they reaffirmed their support for Fidesz and its national-populist rhetoric of resistance against the EU’s and IMF’s economic prescriptions. And yet the left-liberal parties that aim to bring Fidesz down now seem to be going out of their way to look like the local representative of Brussels, business and banks. In the process, they are leaving the far-right Jobbik to sweep up the votes of the increasing numbers of disgruntled middle- and lower-income voters who are disappointed with the arrogance and corruption of Orban-ocracy but poor enough to have faced the wrong end of the free market.

The center-left opposition should perhaps instead take heed of a recent poll which revealed that Jobbik is now the largest party among those younger than 30. That’s scary. To fight that trend, it’s time for the left, such as it is, to show that its primary concern is with the struggle many poor, working class and lower-middle class Hungarians are waging to get by. I’m not sure that identifying itself with the likes of Kész and Bokros is going to help with that.

Update: Opposition candidate Zoltán Kész won, and with a surprisingly comfortable margin, 42,6% against the Fidesz candidate’s 33.8%, the Jobbik candidate’s 14.1%, and the LMP’s 4.6% (the remainder went mostly to independent candidates). That’s a striking contrast with last year’s results, when Navracsics got 47.2%, the center-left’s joint candidate 27.6%, the Jobbik candidate 16.5% and the LMP candidate 6.2%. Turnout was 45%, which is lower than last year’s 64% but high for a by-election. Christopher Adam at Hungarian Free Press has more info. Worth noting: somebody on Twitter mentioned that the 8 o’clock news broadcast on national public TV mentioned nothing about the election result, even though some 80% of the votes had by then already been counted, and it was clear that Fidesz was losing.

It’s election day in Greece and the campaign will have been one of the shortest Europe’s seen in some while: it’s just 27 days ago, on 29 December, that parliament failed to elect a new president in the last of three votes, which triggered these new elections. Politicians scrambled to launch their campaigns, and former Prime Minister George Papandreou even still quickly founded a new party. “Few election campaigns have been as bitter or polarised as this,” the Guardian reported. And yet, all the sound and fury caused remarkably small changes in political preferences.

In particular, with all eyes trained on two main parties fighting for high stakes, you might expect the electorate to gravitate towards them, abandoning smaller parties that get neglected in the media coverage. This would seem especially likely in Greece because of the quirk in its election system, which awards the largest party a bonus 50 seats, making sure it will at least get close to a parliamentary majority. Some of this trend did indeed play out in Greece, but more so in the months prior to the election campaign. Over the second half of last year, both the governing New Democracy party and main opposition party Syriza steadily won over ever more voters, taking Syriza from 29% to over 33% and New Democracy from 24% to 29%. At some point Syriza’s average lead in the polls stretched out to almost 7%, then it shrank again to just over 4%. But by the time the actual election campaign rolled around, despite polls showing a large share of the population still undecided, their respective positions and those of most of the smaller parties evened out. That’s illustrated in this table, which shows a polling average drawn from the most recent poll from each pollster within the given time period:*

Dec 12-24
(11 polls)

Jan 20-23
(15 polls)

New Democracy

28,9

29,6

0,7

Syriza

33,5

35,9

2,4

Potami

6,8

6,7

-0,1

Golden Dawn

6,2

6,3

0,1

Communists

6,1

5,3

-0,8

PASOK

6,1

5,1

-1

Indep Greeks

3,5

3,7

0,2

Kinima

0

2,6

2,6

Others

8,8

5,1

-3,7

* If a pollster published two polls within the period, only the last one is counted; dates reflect the mid-point of when the polls were being conducted where available, not the day of publication.

Syriza netted another 2.4%, which is a decent achievement in the light of the government’s attempts to instill fear and panic over a possible Syriza take-over, but no sea change. Papandreou’s new party didn’t make much of a dent, stalling at 2.6%. The very smallest parties, those which polled under the system’s three percent electoral threshold, lost a lot of ground, but all the other remained roughly stable, with only the communist KKE and the center-left PASOK party losing a percentage point.

In the interest of polling hygiene, you may want to compare only those polls which were in the field during both time periods, in order to avoid the difference between the two periods reflecting ‘house effects’ of the pollsters rather than actual changes in public opinion. The data are very similar though:

Dec 12-24
(11 polls)

Jan 20-23
(11 polls)

ND

28,9

29,4

0,5

Syriza

33,5

36,1

2,6

Potami

6,8

6,8

0,0

Golden Dawn

6,2

6,3

0,1

KKE

6,1

5,3

-0,8

PASOK

6,1

5,0

-1,1

Indep Greeks

3,5

3,7

0,2

Kinima

0,0

2,6

2,6

Others

8,8

5,1

-3,7

That doesn’t mean there weren’t some interesting dynamics during the campaign though. In fact, it seems to have reached a tipping point about half way through. Here’s the same data as above, including all pollsters, but for three different periods, including a time period mid-way during the campaign:

Dec 12-24
(11 polls)

Jan 6-14
(17 polls)

Jan 20-23
(15 polls)

New Democracy

28,9

30,8

1,9

29,6

-1,2

Syriza

33,5

34,7

1,2

35,9

1,2

Potami

6,8

6,8

0,0

6,7

-0,1

Golden Dawn

6,2

6,1

-0,1

6,3

0,2

Communists

6,1

5,7

-0,4

5,3

-0,4

PASOK

6,1

4,9

-1,2

5,1

0,2

Indep Greeks

3,5

3,0

-0,5

3,7

0,7

Kinima

0

2,7

2,7

2,6

-0,1

Others

8,8

5,6

-3,2

5,1

-0,5

Here’s the chart to that latest set of data – click to enlarge.

The polling average from three periods: the two weeks before the election campaign started; an eight-day window halfway through the campaign; and the last four days of polling.

In the first week or two of the campaign, we still see a continuation of the trend from the previous half a year: both New Democracy and Syriza gain some additional ground, at the expense of especially the “others” category of smallest parties. In addition, the emergence of Papandreou’s splinter party predictably hurt his old party, PASOK.

But in the last week or two of the campaign, New Democracy suddenly started slipping away, first almost imperceptibly, and with greater urgency the closer the elections came. In the couple of days, four different pollsters have seen ND numbers that are 2-4% lower than they were earlier this month. Syriza, on the other hand, kept on its incremental growth, and now its average lead in the polls is back up to over 6%. The Independent Greeks, a right-wing, anti-bailout party, seemed to benefit as well, rebounding a bit from its perilous position near the threshold line.

Narrowing the selection of polls down to only those pollsters which were in the field during each of these three periods doesn’t change much about the pattern:

Dec 12-24
(11 polls)

Jan 6-14
(11 polls)

Jan 20-23
(11 polls)

ND

28,9

30,8

1,9

29,4

-1,4

Syriza

33,5

34,7

1,2

36,1

1,4

Potami

6,8

6,8

0,0

6,8

0,0

Golden Dawn

6,2

6,1

-0,1

6,3

0,2

KKE

6,1

5,7

-0,4

5,3

-0,4

PASOK

6,1

4,9

-1,2

5,0

0,1

Indep Greeks

3,5

3,0

-0,5

3,7

0,7

Kinima

0

2,7

2,7

2,6

-0,1

Others

8,8

5,6

-3,2

5,1

-0,5

Now, all we can do is wait until the polling stations close and we can see how far off the polls might have been!

Wikipedia has a seemingly exhaustive list of opinion polls, which appears to be updated every day or almost every day. The numbers there have been recalculated where necessary to exclude any “undecided” or “would not vote” percentage, so the totals of each poll add up to 100%.

As of tonight, there have been a staggering 17 polls by 15 different pollsters in the last week (Alco and Rass both published two). Taking the average of the most recent poll from each pollster (i.e. excluding the older of the two polls by Alco and Rass), Syriza gets an average 34.8% of the vote, New Democracy gets 30.4%; see the spreadsheet linked below.

The system

The Greek electoral system, based on proportional representation, is marked by two peculiarities. The first is an electoral threshold of 3%; any party getting less than that gets no seats. The second is that the party with the greatest number of votes gets a bonus 50 seats, with the aim of increasing political stability. (The only other example I can think of that follows this model is how one of Italy’s two houses of parliament was elected in the past decade.) In total the Greek parliament has 300 seats, so for a governing majority you need 151.

Right now, according to the average of recent polls, almost 9% of Greeks would vote for parties that are set to miss the 3% threshold. Those includes the newly launched outfit of former Prime Minister George Papandreou, To Kinima, which is polling at an average of 2.7%, and Dimar, which has declined so much it’s usually not listed separately in polling results anymore. This means that the 250 parliamentary seats that are allocated proportionally are divided up based on the votes of about 91% of the electorate.

For 9% of Greek voters to miss out on parliamentary representation would be a shame, but it would hardly be unprecedented; in the May 2012 elections, an astonishing 18% of them voted for minor parties that got less than 3% each. (They wizened up in the elections two months later though, when just 6% did.)

Top of the sheet: current average polling for each party; and prospective number of seats for each party, taking into account the 3% threshold and 50-seat bonus.

Underneath: the results from each recent poll, from Wikipedia.

Syriza’s prospects

Just six seats from a majority sounds good for Syriza. But it’s not entirely as good as it may seem:

The party would still need to get those six additional seats to get to a parliamentary majority, and there doesn’t seem to be an ample choice of partners.

Greek politics is divided both between left and right and between those who support and oppose the bailout packages and accompanying austerity policies. As supporters of the bailout packages, long-time former rivals ND and PASOK found each other in the incumbent government, which was already something of an emergency alliance (and all but killed PASOK electorally). For opponents of the bailout policies on the left and right to find each other in a similar way would be even harder, since they are posited on the respective flanks of the political system.

On the left, there is Syriza and the communists; on the right, the Independent Greeks and the fascists. The fascists are beyond the pale for anyone. The communists, however, if I understand things correctly, aren’t particularly useful either. Stuck in the 1950s, they’re the fully unreconstructed type, best at home in issuing declarative statements in the wooden language of the Soviet era, while waiting for the revolution to come. They might not prove reliable partners in government. An alliance with the populist conservatives of the Independent Greeks seems like a wildcard option, since they do share Syriza’s anti-bailout, anti-austerity stance, but they’re on the brink of failing to meet the 3% threshold.

The alternative is finding allies among the center-left parties PASOK and To Potami (“The River”). The latter party, a center-left outfit headed by a famous TV personality, has apparently teamed up with the pro-business DRASI party, which doesn’t bode well for collaboration in an anti-bailout program. And PASOK politicians would have to make a complete turn-about from their current collaboration in the ND-led government.

A few percent change here and there could change everything.

Syriza’s lead over ND has eroded from around 7% in October/November to just over 4% now. It seems to have stabilized over the past two weeks, but it’s not a safe lead. Ahead of the May 2012 elections, polls were wildly off, starkly overstating support for the “old” parties ND, PASOK and KKE and equally understating support for the insurgent Syriza and Golden Dawn. In the June 2012 elections, the polls did a lot better, but had ND and Syriza tied going into the elections when ND ended up winning by 3%.

If To Kinima does pass the 3% threshold, this would take away seats from all the other parties, including Syriza, and make the 251 seats harder to get to. Vice versa, if the Independent Greeks would fail the threshold, this would scatter its seats across the other parties, bringing Syriza 3 seats closer to a majority, but deprive it of a potential ally on certain issues.

The populist right-wing Alliance for Germany (AfD) had a chance to repeat the success it enjoyed in state elections in Saxony two weeks ago in two state elections last Sunday, which both also took place in the former East-Germany. But in both Brandenburg and Thüringen, it went one better and got double-digit percentages. The AfD got 12% of the vote in Brandenburg (sometimes nicknamed “the small GDR”) and 10% in Thüringen.

Just like in Saxony, the AfD took votes from across the political spectrum, pollster Infratest Dimap revealed. In Thüringen, just like in Saxony, the Christian-Democratic CDU, Social-Democratic SPD and (ex-communist) Left Party all saw 5-6% of their 2009 voters switch to the AfD, while the liberal FDP and extreme-right NPD lost significantly larger shares of their electorates to the party.

On the bright side, the SPD in Brandenburg easily maintained their position as the state’s top party, though the Left Party, which had been their junior government coalition partner, lost a lot and booked its worst state elections result there since 1990. Nevertheless, just like last time, Brandenburg’s SPD is free to choose to govern with them or with the CDU; either combination would have a majority.

In Thüringen, weirdly, the SPD has the same luxury of being able to pick its coalition partner, even though they lost heavily and were left with just 12% of the vote. Both the CDU and the Left Party did well, cementing their positions at the top of the state’s party system, and they both want to govern – but neither of them can do it without the Social-Democrats. So it will either be a renewed CDU/SPD government, with a parliamentary majority of 1, or a Left Party/SPD/Green government, also with a parliamentary majority of 1.

The latter would of course be more ground-breaking and exciting, but oddly enough the three parties actually pooled less of the state vote (46.3%) than five years ago (52.1%), and obviously back then the Social-Democrats chickened out, even though they were promised the Prime Ministerial post by the (larger) Left Party. However, their chickening out last time round, and their stubborn refusal to express a preference for one or the other coalition option in this year’s campaign, led to them losing a fair amount of votes to the Left Party in these elections. So maybe they won’t do it again.

I won’t do a fully-fledged blog post, but I tweeted some interesting data I’ll collate them here:

Voter flows

The Left Party in Brandenburg lost 19 thousand voters to the AfD, which attracted some attention; in part because of the curiosity of a stridently left-wing party losing voters to a populist right-wing party, and that not being an isolated phenomenon either, with far-left losing votes to far-right parties elsewhere as well; and in part because the AfD seemed to go out of its way to fish for Left Party votes. But to keep this in perspective: the Left Party also lost a whopping 119 thousand voters – six times as many – to the non-voter camp.

Vice versa, the CDU in Brandenburg had a good night, overtaking the Left as the state’s second-largest party for the first time since 1999, but nevertheless also lost 19 thousand votes to the AfD, meaning that the CDU lost a larger share of its 2009 voters to the AfD than the Left Party did.

The

Voter transfers to the AfD in Thüringen

AfD in Thuringen also pulled votes from across the political spectrum, as this chart shows. (The “Andere” category here includes 10,000 votes the AfD pulled from the NPD.)

What these numbers mean is that the CDU lost 7% of its 2009 vote in Brandenburg, and 5% of its 2009 vote in Thüringen to the AfD; the Left Party lost 5% and 6%, respectively, of its 2009 vote in the two states to the AfD; and the FDP lost 14% and 12% of its vote, respectively, to the AfD. The SPD lost 6% of its 2009 vote in Thüringen to the AfD, but just 3% of its vote in Brandenburg.

Demographics:

More data on who voted for whom: In both Thüringen and Brandenburg, the AfD’s best professional groups were workers and the self-employed. And in both states, the Left Party did best among the unemployed and pensioners.

Here’s a worrying data point: for both the SPD and the Left Party, in both Brandenburg and Thüringen, the best age group was those over 60+. The fact that it’s true for both parties makes it all the more worrying about their long-term future in these East-German states. Meanwhile, the best age group for the AfD in both states was those between 25 and 34.

History:

A historical perspective: the Left Party booked its best ever result in Thüringen … and its worst result since 1990 in Brandenburg. The SPD booked its worst result in the postcommunist era in Thüringen, and ex aequo (with 2004) the worst in Brandenburg. The Greens got their best result in Brandenburg since 1990, and the FDP its worst result there ever. Surprisingly, the FDP in Thüringen has seen worse times still (1.1% in 1999). The Spiegel has a couple of interactive charts to explore some of those historical trajectories, and here are screenshots for two of them:

Strong in Thüringen, weak in Brandenburg - Left Party state election results since 1990

Strong in Brandenburg, weak in Thüringen - SPD state election results since 1990

You may have seen Karl Rove opine in the WSJ that “support for the stimulus bill is falling”, and that “the more Americans learn about the bill, the less they like it.” He is certainly not the only conservative asserting that the bill is impopular.

I’m not in the super-enthusiastic category myself, if obviously for very different reasons than conservatives have for disliking it. Overall I think the bill doesn’t look bad, though my initial enthusiasm has been damped somewhat after reading, for example, Paul Krugman’s very persuasive commentary. It’s probably not enough, and maddeningly worse than it could have been; but it’s still a whole lot better than nothing, and it does have lots of good stuff in it. So far my layman’s take, which is not exactly the most interesting one.

But what does the American population think? Is Karl Rove right? Unsurprisingly, not quite. An overview of the polls that were conducted in the past two and a half weeks, and explicitly asked respondents to express an opinion for or against the bill.

There are two pollsters that have done more than one poll within this timeframe: Gallup and Rasmussen.

Gallup asked: “As you may know, Congress is considering a new economic stimulus package of at least 800 billion dollars. Do you favor or oppose Congress passing this legislation?” All three times it polled the question, it found a majority in favor, and in the last iteration, on the 10th, that majority had grown from 52% to 59%.

Rasmussen asked: “Do you favor or oppose the economic recovery package proposed by Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats?” It found strikingly different results.

According to Rasmussen, in late January a narrow plurality of 42% was in favour; a week later the roles were reversed, with a plurality of 43% in opposition; and by the 11th a plurality of 44% was in favour again.

Three other pollsters asked a variation of the same question at some point in these last two and a half weeks.

A CBS poll queried respondents: “Would you approve or disapprove of the federal government passing an economic stimulus bill costing more than 800 billion dollars in order to try to help the economy?” They approved by 51% to 39%.

A Pew poll asked respondents: “From what you’ve read and heard, do you think [the economic stimulus plan being proposed by President Obama that may cost about $800 billion] is a good idea or a bad idea?”. It found a narrow majority of 51% saying it was a good idea; 34% thought it was a bad idea.

My comparison from a week and a half ago of how Obama’s polling numbers match up with Kerry’s polling in 2004, Gore’s in 2000 and Clinton’s in 1996 has surprisingly become the most visited page on this blog since. Considering the interest, I thought it would be good to provide a last-day update on how the comparison is shaping up at the end of the campaign.

There are four daily tracking polls this year that also conducted daily tracking polls in either 2000 or 2004 or both. The comparison between the races shapes up differently depending on which pollster’s numbers you look at. The best known is Gallup, and this graph compares Obama’s performance versus McCain in the Gallup poll with Kerry’s, Gore’s and Clinton’s performance against their Republican opponents:

Looking good indeed; the 11-point lead Gallup showed for Obama in its final presidential estimate last night is on par with its election-day polling lead for Bill Clinton in ’96. While Clinton’s ample lead gradually eroded over the course of the last two weeks of campaigning, Obama’s held steady. Quite the difference with the nailbiters the last Gallup polls out predicted for the 2000 and 2004 races.

TIPP is a polling firm you may not have heard of; it has conducted a daily tracking poll for the Investors Business Daily this year, and for IBD and the Christian Science Monitor in earlier years. Of the seven tracking polls that were conducted on a daily basis in the last two weeks, this poll has tended to show the smallest Obama leads of all. When McCain’s chief strategist Steve Schmidt asserted, two weeks ago, that “the McCain campaign is roughly in the position where Vice President Gore was running against President Bush,” the TIPP poll was the only poll that confirmed his assertion.

Today, however, brings good news for Obama supporters: after oscillating between a 1-point and 5-point lead for Obama for two weeks, TIPP published a final estimate last night that had Obama leading by 7.2%. And that makes the comparison over the years look like this:

In 24 hours time, we will know a lot more – but for now, we’re still going on polls. OK, on polls and early voting numbers by party affiliation.

The daily tracking polls on this final day of campaigning are surprisingly, and reassuringly, stable. No tightening nor expanding of Obama’s lead; just a seemingly random mix of minor fluctuations. Research 2000 has Obama’s lead down a point, ABC/WaPo has it down two. But Rasmussen and Zogby have it up a point, and the two Gallup likely voter models are up by two and three points respectively. The IBD/TIPP poll had Obama’s lead plummeting from five to two points yesterday, and has it back up to five again today.

All in all, the average of the tracking polls (taking the expanded likely voter model of Gallup’s) has Obama’s lead up a tick from 6.4% to 7.0%. That’s higher than it’s been in a week. In the last five days it’s gone up from 5.6% to 7.0%, so the last minute mojo would seem to be more Obama’s than McCain’s.

There is a little more disagreement again between the pollsters about the actual size of Obama’s lead though. Basically there’s two clusters. Rasmussen, Hotline, Research 2000, IBD/TIPP and Zogby all have Obama’s lead at 5-7 points. I’d go with the crowd here, but Gallup and the ABC/WaPo poll disagree. They have it at 9 points (WaPo) or 11 points (Gallup, both likely voter models). In fact, they’ve had it at 8-11 points for four days now, even as the other pollsters oscillated between 2 and 7 points.

Here’s something to feed your jitters: three new polls on Pennsylvania, all showing Obama ahead by just 4-5%.

How should we regard them? And will the electoral fate of Pennsylvania matter in the big picture anyway? First, a rundown of the polls in question:

Thursday saw the release of an NBC/Mason-Dixon poll that had Obama ahead by just 4 points, 47% to 43%.

Not reassuring: The last time Mason-Dixon polled the state was in mid-September, when it had Obama ahead by 2. At the time (McCain was still riding his post-Convention bounce), that was comparable with what other pollsters were finding: six other polls conducted around the same time ranged from a tie to a 5-point Obama lead.

Possible comfort: The poll was of a mere 625 likely voters, making for a relatively high 4% margin of error.Possible comfort: Mason-Dixon, Nate Silver pointed out, “has .. had a Republican “lean” this cycle of perhaps 2-3 points. They are quite frequently the most favorable number for John McCain in any given state.”

The Pollster.com trendlines for the state since 4 February, when Internet polls are filtered out and the trend smoothing is set to more sensitive.

In my post, after the third presidential debate, about McCain’s efforts to make “spreading the wealth around” sound like the most ominous thing, I quoted Ezra Klein as saying that “for most folks, spreading the wealth around probably seems like a good idea” right now.

This is correct, Brian Schaffner of the CCPS argued yesterday at his new home on pollster.com. Taking as lead how the ABC/WaPo poll hasn’t shown any movement this month on the question which candidate is trusted more on the question of taxes, he digs up data showing so from a 2003 survey conducted by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Kennedy School of Government.

Moreover, in case you’re feeling doubtful about those sponsors, the same thing is largely confirmed by Gallup data, which the polling firm’s in-depth look at the issue on Thursday revealed.

Schaffner argues that the McCain camp’s insistence that Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on the top 5% of income-earners smacks of class struggle and socialism doesn’t drill into much of a popular perception. It isn’t surprising “that McCain hasn’t gotten much traction by criticizing the fact that Obama wants to increase taxes for high income Americans,” Schaffner writes, because the 2003 survey actually showed that most Americans believe “high income people pay less than their fair share”. Over 60% of Independents, over 70% of Democrats and even a plurality of Republicans agreed. Barely over 10% of independents and some 30% of Republicans, on the other hand, thought that high income people “pay more than their fair share”:

The Gallup polling data doesn’t directly address the question whether wealthy Americans pay enough taxes, but it does show a majority of Americans believing that “the distribution of money and wealth in this country” isn’t “fair”. Throughout intermittent polls in the last twenty-odd years, an ample majority opined that wealth should be “more evenly distributed among a larger percentage of the people,” while just 27-37% believed that the current distribution is fair:

Two details strike me in this graph. The opinion that “spreading the wealth around” seems like a good idea isn’t just something that’s coming up “right now”, in the face of a financial crisis; it’s actually been pretty consistent through the years. But there’s two kinds of variations over time.

I’m a bit confused about what masterplan, evil or otherwise, McCain would be implementing right now – I mean, ginning up a red scare about Obama the Socialist, really? But it wouldnt be the first time that a tack I considered wholly idiotic seems to work with American voters. (They sometimes work with Dutch voters too, for that matter – though probably not the red-baiting one.)

Either way, the daily tracking polls are showing some tightening of the race. Could be statistical noise, could be real. The movement would probably not be enough to decide the race either way, but still, the lowest estimates of Obama’s lead are getting disconcertingly close to zero:

Gallup has Obama’s lead down 3 points today, both in its expanded likely voter model (from 10% to 7%) and its traditional model (from 5% to a perilous 2%);

Rasmussen has Obama’s lead down 3 points in two days, from 8% to 5%;

Research 2000 has Obama’s lead down 4 points in two days, from 11% to 7%;

Zogby has Obama’s lead down a point today to just 4%, after it already fell from 10% to 5% the day before yesterday.

The IBD/TIPP poll is stubbornly stuck at a modest 3-4% Obama lead since the 22nd.

All in all, Obama’s average lead in the daily tracking polls has fallen from 8.3% three days ago to 6.0% tonight.

Chart 1: All daily tracking polls

It should be said that there is one non-tracking poll that paints a seriously different picture. A Pew poll out today is showing a delirious 15-point lead for Obama among likely voters, with McCain down at just 38%. John Judis flagged that one (using the poll’s even more favourable numbers for registered voters) to tell us to “start popping the corks”.

The balance is evened out again, however, by the GWU Battleground tracking poll (which I dont include in the graphs because it’s not a daily tracking poll), which has Obama’s lead unchanged at just 3%. So count me in with his colleague Noam Scheiber, who is “still sweating” it.

This bit of polling analysis caught my attention: Obama does well among whites, very, very well indeed. But with one glaring exception: the South. The Southern exception is alive and well:

Obama is outperforming any Democrat back to Jimmy Carter among white voters, getting 45 percent to McCain’s 52 percent. But in the South, it is a very different story. Obama fares worse among Southern whites than any Democrat since George McGovern in 1972.

My electoral map of how whites voted in 2004 already showed that when you single out white voters, it’s not Wyoming and Utah that are the most Republican states, it’s Mississippi, Alabama and South-Carolina. The latest ABC/WaPo poll suggests that even as whites across the country have been remarkably receptive to Obama’s message, those in the South are still very hostile:

Whites in the East and West tilt narrowly toward Obama (he’s up 8 and 7 points, respectively), and the two run about evenly among those in the Midwest. By contrast, Southern whites break more than 2 to 1 for McCain, 65 percent to 32 percent.

That stark divide is not simply a partisan difference. While white Democrats outside the South give Obama margins of 80 points or more, he leads by a more modest 65 points among white Southern Democrats. The Democrat is up 55 points among liberal whites in the region, far under his performance among those voters elsewhere, where he is up by 79 points.

Southern white independents are also far more likely than politically independent whites in other regions to support McCain: They break 62 to 33 percent in his favor. White independents in the West favor Obama by a similarly wide margin, 63 to 34 percent. White political independents in the East and Midwest divide much more evenly.

A fair bit of attention has been paid in the blogs today to the assertion of McCain’s chief strategist Steve Schmidt that “The McCain campaign is roughly in the position where Vice President Gore was running against President Bush one week before the election of 2000.” It’s met a good dose of scepticism. The WaPo drily annotated the quote as follows:

McCain’s team dismisses the most dire polls — those showing the race nationally with a double-digit lead for Obama. Advisers believe the contest’s margin is in the five-to-seven-point range, about the same deficit, they say, that then-Vice President Al Gore faced at this time eight years ago against then-Gov. George W. Bush. (A Washington Post poll at the same point in the 2000 race showed a tie.)

[T]he NBC/WSJ poll right before the election found Bush ahead by three among likely voters (47%-44%). But our most recent poll shows Obama up [..] 11 points among likely voters (53%-42%).

In addition, Marc Ambinder points out that the margins are “way different” state-by-state: “Obama’s doing much better in 2008 than Al Gore was in 2000 in the battleground states.”

Now I had a graph up here a week or two ago charting how Obama’s current Gallup numbers compare with the lead or deficit that Kerry, Gore and Clinton faced in the previous three presidential elections. In the days since, Googlers have found this site through at least 27 permutations of searches involving some combination around Gore, Bush, polls, October, historical, 2000, elections, tracking and Gallup. So this is a good occasion to update that post and expand it, not just looking at the Gallup numbers but also those from the ABC, Zogby and TIPP daily tracking polls from 2000, 2004 and 2008.

First off, that chart from last time, based on the Gallup polling numbers from the last four elections. Here’s the update: